Starcrossed
by deeplyshallow
Summary: She looks up at the stars, safe in his arms, and despite the shit she's been through in the last week, despite the police and the crimes and her failure of a dad somehow she can still see their future here, a million possibilities lie ahead of them. They are lying at the end of the world, simply waiting for a new one to begin.


She looks up at the stars, safe in his arms, and despite the shit she's been through in the last week, despite the police and the crimes and her failure of a dad somehow she can still see their future here, a million possibilities lie ahead of them.

They are lying at the end of the world, simply waiting for a new one to begin.

XXX

In one world she hears the gunshot, and sees him fall down, her nails dig into the cop's arms, her piecing screams cutting through the air, but she can barely hear them over the roar of her thumping heart .

_He's not moving, he's not moving,_ oh god she can see blood, she needs to get to him, she needs to be with him, she needs to be with him more than anything in the word.

"Let me go, LET ME GO, LETMEGO!"

The arms loosen, for only a fraction of a second, not enough to let her slip away but enough to rearrange herself so her mouth is near the cop's arm.

She bites her, using all the force she can, until she can taste blood. She hears the cop swear as she withdraws her arm, but it no longer matters as she's already on her feet, running like she never has before, screaming his name in the vain hope it'll make him move.

She hears the sound of a gun, somewhere she registers a bullet hitting the sand beside her, but she has no room for fear, there is only one thing she needs in this life, to get to him, to be with him.

She's nearly reached him, she's ten metres away, five, one, just a few steps…

Another shot is fired. The force knocks her to the ground long before she registers the pain. She reaches up, manages, just, to brush her fingertips with his cold, lifeless ones.

They stay like that until their bodies are taken away, buried in separate graveyards as per their families' wishes.

The press label them the modern day Romeo and Juliet.

She'd always hated Shakespeare.

XXX

In another his body never turns lifeless, he's knocked down, injured but still breathing. She screams, struggles harder in the cop's arms, but when he cries out clutching his leg, and a paramedic calls out that he needs an ambulance but he's stable.

She slumps in relief.

They're gentle with her when they interrogate her, telling her that if she just confesses, tells them he was the one who committed the crimes she can go home.

But she doesn't want to go home. She doesn't have a home. The best home she had was on a cliff overlooking a beach for one night. They want to blame it all on James which makes her even more determined to tell the truth. So she tells them everything. It was her idea to break into the house, she who shoplifted, her idea to steal the car, her being caught by the professor which caused the murder.

They're significantly less gentle with her after that.

The judge is sympathetic and they're given a light sentence. Four years each and they'll be given new names and identities after they're released so they can have a chance of a better life.

There's only one condition. They must never contact each other again.

It feels worse than death row.

After the verdict, they can't find any words, they just cling onto each other in the hope that if they do so tight enough they'll be impossible to separate. But they can and are, and the last they ever see of each other is a tear blurred vision of a figure being pushed through a door.

They're remembered almost with fondness by the press. A modern day Bonnie and Clyde making their way down the country on a crime spree, only killing those who deserved it.

When they're let out, it's a quiet matter, they're both let out early for good behaviour, given new names and set up in opposite ends of the country, with clean records and no knowledge of the other.

Twenty years after the events a film is produced. It's a big budget American one, with a load more guns (do they have any idea how hard it is to get them here?), a couple more murders and no idea how British teenagers speak. It's a moderate success, enough for the press to track down their names and locations and publish them for the world to see.

Neither have married but they have houses, careers, friends. Ones that they have to scramble to maintain now they've been made public.

But there's a ray of hope because, for the first time in twenty years, they know where the other is that, if they dare, reconnection is only a moment away.

And in the next few years they both produce a few dozen half typed emails and dial each other's numbers so often they know them off by heart, never daring to press send. They gaze at each other's pictures, tracing over the features, so familiar but so different, safe in the knowledge that somewhere the other is alive, maybe even happy.

They never go further than that.

XXX

In this world she doesn't confess, lets the relief fill her body when they find out he's alive but when she's interrogated, she stays silent, not that she has much to look forward to but it's what he wanted her to do.

His sentence isn't light. They don't try him as a minor and tack ridiculous things like kidnapping and premeditated murder onto the charge. She tries to protest, she gets up and swears at the judge, but it's too late, James denies all her claims, says she's trying to protect him, and confesses to all the crimes.

He's a lot better at speaking calmly in court so they believe him.

She has to be carried out of the room screaming when he's sentenced to life.

She visits him every week without fail, swearing that she'll wait for him when he gets out.

He tells her not to, he doesn't want her wasting her life pining after him, he doesn't want her to lose the years he's already given up.

She won't listen, so he plays the only card he has left.

"I had the knife with me because I was planning to kill you."

He's very calm when he explains it all. It all makes sense.

She stops visiting him after that.

She grows up, finds a few boyfriends who she dumps when they hit her, finds one who doesn't and marries him. He is a good man, she goes to therapy, gets a job, becomes a mother. She lives a happy life, the life he wanted her to live.

But when she hears he hung himself just days after his release, she locks herself in her bedroom for days and sobs until nothing more comes out.

XXX

In one world, she sees him carried off the beach in a stretcher, paramedics swarming around him, but one glance at his gaunt face and she already know he's gone.

She faints.

When she comes round she's simply numb. She lets her mum's lawyer do the talking and eventually they let her go without charge.

So instead she gets vermin reporters, which are definitely worse

Tony fucking revels in it.

He and her mum go on and on about how they're so happy to have their daughter back, how she's finally safe from this monster. The Sun paints James as a loner psychopath while she's seen as some dumb victim represented by images of her making duckfaces at the camera for facebook and a few pictures of herself half-dressed which she didn't know Tony had taken of her. The Mail is worse, with its ridiculous judgey comments as if James hadn't done the world a fucking favour by killing a rapist.

She goes on a few talk shows in the vain hope she can defend him, but she starts getting mouthy when they mention James and the invites rapidly stop.

The publicity dies down and suddenly she doesn't even have that to distract her.

She sits in her room one day, Tony and her mum are out somewhere with the kids, and thinks about him. Even now the memories, so vivid, are fading. Every time she tries to picture him in those blissful moments in the car, when he danced – eyes scrunched up shut, as he kissed her on the edge of the cliff, she can only see his face pale and clammy like it was when it was carried off – not so full of life as she knew it was.

She needs to remember him.

She leaves her room for the first time in days, walks down to the kitchen, picks out a knife, not his, they wouldn't let her have it back because it was evidence, but it is sharp and shiny and that's all that matter.

She tests it, pricks it against her wrist and sees a red drop run down her arm, she puts it in again, moving it this time, carefully carving a J. When the cut is made she admires her handiwork and then focuses on the A. She is so focused she barely notices the pain, the blood dripping down feels like a ritual sacrifice to the boy who gave his life for her. Now he'll be with her always.

They lock her up in a hospital for a few weeks after that. She spends it staring at the wall despondently until they let her out.

Her mother chucks her out when a social worker is sent to investigate the twins (nothing comes out of it, her mother and Tony are the perfect fucking parents to them).

With nowhere else to go she finds herself walking the same path she did back when it all began

She doesn't knock, just sits on his doorstep, thinking and not thinking. Eventually the door opens and she looked up at the figure she expected to see but not the one she wants. Neither of them talk but he lets her inside.

He offers her a cup of tea and she nods.

"He was weird y'a know," he says after a while of them staring into their teacups, "he's always been, especially since his mother died, but maybe even before that. I tried to keep him happy. Raise him best I could. But I couldn't get through to him, not like you could, he just used to glare at me as if I was the worst dad in the world. Sometimes I think he didn't love me at all."

She thinks about how James told her he hated him, how he wanted to punch him in the face, but she also thinks about how devastated he was when they crashed the car, how worried he was that his father would hate him when he found out what he did.

"He did love you."

There's a trace of a smile on his face even as it screws up with tears. "I loved him so much."

She leans into him, lets him sob into her shoulder as the tears fall freely down her face, because somehow in the last place she'd expect she's found an adult who understands, who cares.

"Me too." She says.

XXX

In one world she refuses the lawyer her mother tries to force on her. James didn't get a lawyer when they murdered him, why should she?

They try and make it as if the police were right. She sees the images in the paper, he never had a facebook so there's not many but they all the worst ones they could find, him looking moody in the corner of school pictures, sulking when his dad took him out and CCTV imagery of him holding up the store where the captions claim he had a gun. Not one is recognisable as the beautiful boy she loved.

Loner, shooter, traumatised, shout the press and the public, no one trying to understand what they went through. Some people even claim he was a terrorist.

He never even shot the fucking gun.

She gets it too of course, comparisons with Rosemary West and general discussions on whether she was a psychopath too or just a dumb lovesick bimbo.

She reads them all, almost in a trance, unable to look away from the awful confirmation that the world always hated them.

"He loved you," says Eunice who has taken to visiting her in preparation for the trial, "more than anything, more than his own life. Some people spend their whole life searching for what you two had. Hell I'm still trying to find it. Surely that's worth something?"

That, more than anything, makes her plead guilty at the trial.

She gets manslaughter, three years for the crime as she's still a minor ("not enough!" cry the public). She'd probably have been let out at 18 months if she'd behaved, but swearing and attacking the people who piss her off is the best way of coping. It's not like she has anywhere to go when she leaves anyway.

No one comes to collect her when she's released, her only possession a pitiful amount of cash. It doesn't matter really, there's only one person she wants to see and the only place she wants to go she's made her way to before.

There's no car journey, hitch hiking and carjacking this time, just a train ticket. The man at the ticket office asks if she has a railcard, she just shrugs and hands him cash.

Once she gets to the station she simply follows the path to the sea, the sound of the crashing waves bringing back memories that she both welcomes and wishes she could forget. When she reaches the cliff overlooking the beach she stares below for a long while, trying to reconcile it with that night, with the morning that followed. It's smaller than she remembered, what seemed like an endless expanse for him to run, could be covered in a matter of minutes, albeit ones he didn't have. It seems less magical too than it did that evening, it's grimy, more stony than sandy and even in early July, it's bloody freezing. Then again perhaps it's to be expected of the beach at the end of the world, the beach where his life ended, where her life did too really.

It's a fucking crime they haven't put a plaque up to mark the police brutality.

If she squints she can still see him running. She sees him turn towards her, open his arms.

There's no choice really. She has to join him.

She closes her eyes, steps off the cliff and prays.

XXX

It feels remote at the end of the world. The cold sea breeze hits her face, she breaths in the salty air, it reminds her of ice cream and childhood. There are far enough from the town that the glare of the streetlights are gone so all she can see is stars, millions and millions stars watching the two of them peacefully sharing this moment.

There are a million different eventualities for them when dawn breaks, but not one of them can change what's already written in the stars, not one of them ends with them together.

But for now, with the gentle lapping in of the waves in their ears, nestled so closely together that they can no longer feel the cold, tomorrow doesn't matter.

* * *

**I am the queen of procrastination, I started writing this straight after I watched season 1 like a year and a half ago and then proceeded to not continue. But it has occurred to me that season 2 is coming out in a week, at which point this fic will be outdated, so I decided to complete this as it was nearly done anyway.**

**In terms of season 2, I sort of don't want it, like obviously I am 100% watching it all but I sort of thought the ending of season 1 was perfect (as indeed was the rest of the show) and I'm not sure I want to know what happens next.**

**You guys can decide for yourself whether you think with this in mind, I'm a hypocrite for this fic, but I sort of just wanted to put on paper my ideas of what might happening without committing to what actually does happen.**


End file.
